New Iridium has achieved a major technical milestone by demonstrating production of 1kg of plant-based acetic acid from corn ethanol (Figure C). This was accomplished using a custom-built irradiated bubble column photoreactor (Figure A) with a theoretical capacity of 1 metric ton per year. Figure B and video show the bubble column photoreactor in action.
Next milestones are a) building a 10 metric tons per year stainless steel bubble column photoreactor and b) improving fractional distillation to achieve acetic acid purity of >90 weight %.
